Topaz Video AI vs DaVinci Resolve Super Scale — which is better for upscaling AI-generated footage?

For AI-generated footage, Topaz Video AI is the stronger upscaler: its reconstruction models (Proteus for manual artifact control, Iris for faces) handle generative defects — plasticky skin, texture hallucination, temporal flicker — that DaVinci Resolve's Super Scale, tuned for clean high-bitrate camera footage, largely passes through. In practice they're complementary: upscale in Topaz first, finish in Resolve.

Run your AI clips through Topaz before they ever touch a Resolve timeline. Generators like Seedance 2.0, Kling, Veo, and Runway typically output 720p–1080p with a defect profile camera footage never has: over-sharpened plastic-looking skin, hallucinated micro-texture, and frame-to-frame inconsistency. Topaz's models reconstruct detail and de-artifact in the same pass, which is exactly what generative output needs; Super Scale is a resolution multiplier that assumes a clean source, so it scales those artifacts up along with the pixels.

Where Topaz wins on AI footage. Use Proteus when you want manual sliders over how aggressively the model rebuilds texture — useful for taming hallucinated detail in AI renders — and Iris when faces are in frame, since it preserves character likeness while sharpening. A single Topaz pass combines upscaling, denoising, and de-artifacting; replicating that in Resolve means stacking separate nodes and processes. Documented AI short-film pipelines treat this kind of reconstruction upscale as the first post step, before any color work — and if you generate inside invideo, Topaz Astra runs there too, so the upscale can happen in the same workspace before export.

Where Super Scale wins. It lives inside your edit: non-destructive, fast, applied per-clip in the timeline with no export round-trip, and good enough when your source is already clean and you only need a modest bump to delivery resolution. Note that Super Scale requires Resolve Studio (~$295 one-time); the free version doesn't include it. Topaz Video AI is a separate purchase at roughly $199/year — so if you already own Studio, test Super Scale on a representative AI clip before buying Topaz, but expect it to fall short on artifact-heavy generations.

The pipeline answer. Treat them as stages, not rivals: generate → upscale and de-artifact (Topaz) → assemble, grade, and finish (Resolve). The upscale alone won't make AI footage read as live action — it still comes out too crisp — so once you're in Resolve, one production team's documented fix was adding a small amount of blur, film grain, and a grade pass on top to pull it toward film. That grading stage is where Resolve earns its place in the chain, regardless of which tool did the upscale.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

When you are generating a lot with seed dance, there tends to be this ultra-sharpness, there's this very plasticky feeling on the skin.

— invideo's creative team